Dr. Matthew Goupell awarded multiple grants from the NIH

Dr. Matthew Goupell, a faculty member of NACS, was recently awarded multiple grants from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA). These grants will fund projects examining how people process different aspects of sounds with cochlear implants, bionic auditory prosthesis that partially restore hearing. He is being helped by other NACS faculty: Dr. Sandra Gordon-Salant, Dr. Samira Anderson, and Dr. Joshua Bernstein.

Dr. Goupell obtained his PhD in physics at Michigan State University and studied the physics and perception of sound, namely hearing with two ears or “binaural hearing.” After this, he started studying how cochlear-implant users localize sounds, organize complex auditory scenes, and understand speech, first at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, Austria and then at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Two of these awards will investigate methods to provide better speech understanding with cochlear implants, particularly in noisy situations. This addresses the primary complaint of cochlear-implant users, that understanding speech in background noise is incredibly difficult. Another award will investigate the effects of aging on hearing with a cochlear implant and simultaneously look at cognitive performance. As the brain changes with age, it may respond differently to the electrical impulses produced by this neural prosthesis. The results of the study aim to help people hear better with cochlear implants and to provide clinical tools for optimization of implant programming.